Galerie Nuke is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Jeremy Kost. Known for his Polaroids and collages featuring nightlife denizens, drag queens, and models, Kost has done what few artists can; he has enacted an unexpected turn in his work while maintaining its accessible roots. The Polaroid has been, since its inception, marketed as a tool for the layman, and it changed the mindset of an entire generation that could suddenly document the poignant minutiae of everyday life. Powered by the documentary urge of the 1980s and 90s, the art world is likewise saturated with well-meaning homages to the candid party picture, but few are able to transcend derivation and imbue their portraiture with personal flair and art historical rigor.

This new series combines Polaroids of lone men with flamboyant swaths of paint that tentatively unite these solitary figures. Like Andy Warhol and Lucas Michael, who have created heretofore unseen worlds with the ostensibly simple Polaroid process, Kost reworks a medium historically tied to instantaneity in order to build complex and multilayered images that, despite their subject matter, deliciously retaliate against easy consumption. These paintings add a resistant patina of thick paint that is still brilliantly subtle, like the coquettishly flushed Rococo cheeks of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher. Kost’s sensual pigments dance with excess, a modern day art brut that recalls Jean Fautrier’s grotesque, sedimentary compositions that are gloriously engrossing even in a state of abjection. In this way, our interaction with Kost’s seemingly straightforward landscapes and interiors becomes interwoven with the politics of paint in all its tactile unruliness. Kost gives us a night at the club, bodies coming together under saturated lights, only to be separated in the gathering dawn.

Like the Polaroid, which cannot be replicated, Kost’s models always exist in isolation, yet he unites disparate figures with the grid, thereby creating a partial visual continuity. Kost’s use of the grid is not unlike the feminist-formalist erotics of Agnes Martin, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elise Adibi, whose regimented forms do not preclude an engagement with identity politics. Similarly, Kost rattles the grid’s reductive, organizational function by amplifying the presence of the body – both in the form of bodily flesh and in the flesh of his chosen medium. Each picture is by definition as unique as a human being, for when the Polaroid is finished, there it sits, complete and irreversible – an immaculate, chemical conception. The finitude of the single Polaroid means that there is no going back once the film has developed; it is a productively insecure process that Kost handles adroitly. Not unlike Sally Mann, he knows when a picture’s flaws add to or detract from the strength of the image.

When one considers these traditionally opposed art historical and technical factors – order, chance, sexuality, formalism, expressionism, minimalism – it becomes clear why so many of the figures in this series seem so introspective. Both the photograph and the sitter – for Kost, both are equally tangible – are doing an incredible amount of work toward conceptual ends that surpass the archetypal party picture. Kost is the guy who self-confidently brings a book with him to the dance floor.

As you may know, my Instagram account (@jeremykost) seems to have taken on a little life of it’s own in the moments following the release of Fractured. As time passed, I’ve realized that a number of ‘fans’ haven’t been able to afford my work, even at it’s lowest levels. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and in an effort to democratize my art practice and allow those fans the opportunity to own unique works at a super affordable price.

I honestly never really thought about my Instagram images as artworks but realized that they were truly composed, resolved images with a specific voice and purpose. That said, every image that I post on Instagram is going to be available as a signed, UNIQUE 8” x 8” pigment print on the same paper that I make my larger works. One print will be available for sale, with one artist’s proof going to the subject depicted in the image, and one going to a mega archive that I will keep for myself.
Priced at $100 shipped ($40 for international), they are going to be super inexpensive as a means of getting the work to the fans who might not be able to afford my work otherwise…

After a long, long wait, FRACTURED is FINALLY available through the studio!

We are super excited to offer you two versions of the book through Jeremy Kost Studio. The regular version is available here, as well as the exclusive artist’s edition of the book.

The artist’s edition is limited to 100 copies and comes with a unique multiple-exposed Polaroid, often those made in the same moment as the work published in the book. We are offering them in a slightly unique way. Once you’ve paid for the edition, you’ll be emailed a link and a password to a password protected website where 130 (yes we know that’s 30 more than are being sold) Polaroids are there for your review. Once you’ve selected, please email the image or the name and number of the Polaroid back and consider it yours! We wanted to give everyone the opportunity to select an image that speaks to them personally, while also honoring the promise Jeremy made to the subjects photographed (specially as it pertains to blasting the images online).

Please note that there will be an additional shipping charge for orders sent out of the United States and that all sales are final.

The FRACTURED artist’s edition comes with a signed and numbered copy of the book comes in a brown linen slipcase with a unique multiple-exposed Polaroid of your choice!

Some selected examples of Polaroids available with the artist’s edition!

Published by Damiani
Text by Glenn O’Brien, Interview by Franklin Sirmans
Foreword by Garrett Neff, Designed by Sam Shahid.

Jeremy Kost’s (born 1977) last monograph, It’s Always Darkest before Dawn, established him as a master of the Polaroid. His body of work is at once image, performative act and genre-bending fusion of subject, environment and artistic technique. Born of one of the fortuitous mistakes in the artist’s studio that leads to incredible breakthroughs–a camera malfunction– Kost’s latest series consists of multiple-exposure Polaroids of young, stereotypically beautiful men–a subject and technique that Kost has been investigating for nearly a decade. These mesmerizing, layered Polaroid images are collected in Fractured, along with contextualizing and descriptive text from Franklin Sirmans, LACMA Curator of Contemporary Art. Made throughout 2013, only a fraction of the work has been seen outside of the studio before the publication of this book. Presenting dreamlike, fractured narratives collapsed into a single Polaroid frame, each image takes the viewer to an intimate place filled with broken dreams and unrequited desire, while celebrating man’s beauty and identity. Whether cropped to show luminous details or simply floated on the page, each photograph represents a tangible, beautiful moment layered in mystery.